The major socio-political changes of the last decades have led to changing ways of being national, changes in the content of national identity if not in the national categories themselves. This comparative social scientific volume takes examples of transitions to democracy (East Europe, Spain) to peace (South Africa, Israel, Northern Ireland) and to territorial decentralization (the United Kingdom, France, Spain), showing in each case how socio-political change and identity change have interlocked. It defines a typology of national identity shift, tracing the changing state forms which provoke national identity shift, and analyzing the process of identity change, its motivations and legitimations. Collecting together a wide range of examples, from South Africa to the Czech Republic from the Basque Country to the Mexican and Irish borders; the book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, from world figures in the study of globalization and social identity to young researchers, to provide a much needed theoretical clarification and empirical evidence of types of national identity shift.

This book contains original research on conflict, peacebuilding and the current state of identities and relationships in relation to the Northern Ireland conflict. It accesses the state of national identity politics in Northern Ireland a generation after the 1998 Agreement, as well as the impact and meaning of Brexit. It considers feminist and faith-based peace activism during ‘the Troubles’, and expressions of Irish national identity. It also includes revealing comparative case studies: Protestant-Catholic conflict elsewhere in Europe and nationalism in the Balkans. The Politics of Conflict and Transformation: The Island of Ireland in Comparative Perspective arises from a conference celebrating the work of Jennifer Todd, Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, who has been one of the most influential scholars of her generation. Her research has examined conflict and transformation in Ireland from the level of grassroots identities to geopolitical forces. She has placed contemporary crises in the peace process in the context of patterns of conflict and change over centuries. She has both expounded the rich detail of the Northern Ireland and Irish-British conflicts and placed them in their regional and global contexts. Written by some of the leading scholars on peace and conflict in Ireland, the chapters in this edited volume build on Todd’s work and are a testament to the thematic and methodological breadth and depth of her output. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Irish and British history and politics, Peace and Conflict Studies, and the sociology of identity, conflict, and peacebuilding. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Irish Political Studies.

This work examines the reasons for and the practice of ethnic migration and the challenges it produces.

Contradictory forces are at play at the close of the twentieth century. There is a growing closeness of peoples fueled by old and new technologies of modern aviation, digital-based communications, new patterns of trade and commerce, and growing affluence of significant portions of the world's population. Television permits individuals around the world to learn about the cultures and lifestyles of peoples of physically distant lands. These developments give real meaning to the notion of a global village. Peoples of the world are growing closer in new and increasingly important ways. Nonetheless, there are disturbing signs of a growing awareness of ethnic differences in all parts of the world the United States included and a concomitant rise in ethnic-based conflicts, many of them extraordinarily violent in nature. Fear, resentment, intoler-ance, and mistreatment of the "other" abound in world news accounts. Not only does this phenomenon pose an interesting juxtaposition to the concept of the emergent glo-bal village, but its emergence in the post-cold war era internationally and the post-civil rights era in the United States raises significant and compelling questions. Why are such conflicts occurring now? How do analysts explain these developments? The essays in Race and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective lucidly explore some of the complexities of the persistence and re-emergence of race and ethnicity as major lines of divisiveness around the world. Contributors analyze manifestations of race-based movements for political empowerment in Europe and Latin America as well as racial intolerance in these same settings. Attention is also given to the conceptual complexi-ties of multidimensional and shared cultural roots of the overlapping phenomena of ethnicity, nationalism, identity, and ideology. The book greatly informs discussions of race and ethnicity in the international context and provides an interesting perspective against which to view America's changing problem of race. Race and Ethnicity in Com-parative Perspective is a timely, thought-provoking volume that will be of immense value to ethnic studies specialists, African American studies scholars, political scientists, his-torians, and sociologists.

This book addresses the challenges of international intervention in violent conflicts and its impact on groups in conflict. When the international community intervenes in a violent internal conflict, intervening powers may harden divisions, constructing walls between groups, or they may foster transformation, soften barriers and build bridges between conflicting groups. This book examines the different types of external processes and their respective contributions to softening or hardening divisions between conflicting groups. It also analyses the types of conflict resolution strategies, including integration, accommodation and partitioning, and investigates the conditions under which the international community decides to pursue a particular strategy, and how the different strategies contribute to solidification or transformation of group identities. The author uses three case studies, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine, to reveal how different types of external interventions impact on the identities of conflicting groups. The volume seeks to address how states and international organizations ought to intervene in order to stimulate the building of bridges rather than walls between conflicting groups. In doing so, the book sheds light on some of the pitfalls in international interventions and highlights the importance of united external process and inclusive identity strategies that promote transformation and bridge differences between conflicting groups. This book will be of much interest to students of intervention, peace and conflict studies, ethnic conflict, security studies and IR.

The book begins with an agenda-setting introduction which will provide an overview of the central question being addressed, such as the circumstances associated with the move towards a political settlement, the parameters of this settlement and the factors that have assisted in bringing it about. The remaining contributions will focus on a range of cases selected for their diversity and their capacity to highlight the full gamut of political approaches to conflict resolution. The cases vary in: the intensity of the conflict (from Belgium, where it is potential rather than actual, to Sri Lanka, where it has come to a recent violent conclusion); in the geopolitical relationship between the competing groups (from Cyprus, where they are sharply segregated geographically, to Northern Ireland, where they are intermingled); in the extent to which a stable constitutional accommodation has been reached (ranging from the Basque Country, with a large range of unresolved problems, to South Africa, which has achieved a significant level of institutional stability). This book ranges over the world’s major geopolitical zones, including Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe and will be of interest to practitioners in the field of international security. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

This book explores everyday identity change and its role in transforming ethnic, national and religious divisions. It uses very extensive interviews in post-conflict Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the early 21st century to compare the extent and the micro-level cultural logics of identity change. It widens comparisons to the Gard in France, and uses multiple methods to reconstruct the impact of identity innovation on social and political outcomes in the 2010s. It shows the irreducible causal importance of identity change for wider compromise after conflict. It speaks to those interested in Cultural Sociology, Politics, Conflict and Peace Studies, Nationalism, Religion, International Relations and European and Irish Studies.